Chipmunks in the Stone Wall

I have a little garden bed right in front of a stone wall. When the wall was first built a few years ago, i thought the little south-facing bed would be perfect for hot weather crops such as peppers and eggplants. It turns out the stone wall is a perfect home for chipmunks, and chipmunks eat pepper plants.

For the past three or four years, i've tried putting milk carton "collars" around the pepper plants with mixed success (read: many failures).

Oh, how many times do i fight the current of Life, trying to row in the direction I want to go.

This summer, i give up. I surrender my garden bed to the chipmunks. After all, i do enjoy watching them dash and dart here and there.

I'm planting Russian sage in this hot spot of a micro-climate. The peppers and eggplants are going somewhere else--farther away from the home of the chipmunks.

I'm Looking Over a 4-Leaf Clover

When i was a child, every Sunday afternoon, after Sunday dinner, my grandmother and i would walk around our house looking for 4-leaf clovers. I still have the knack of finding them. Today i put a flat down on the grass and voila! A 4-leaf clover was staring up at me.

Today is Wesak, the full moon that celebrates the Buddha's awakening. It's a good time to take refuge in the Buddha, take refuge in the Dharma, and take refuge in the Sangha.

According to the Dhammapada:
One who takes refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, sees the Four Noble Truths:

1. Suffering, 
2. the Cause of Suffering, 
3. the Cessation of Suffering,
4. and the 8-fold Noble Path which leads to the Cessation of Suffering.

These are the 4 Truths that will bring us more "luck" than any 4-leaf clover.

Awareness of Forget-Me-Nots

Forget-me-nots form a sky-blue cloud floating on several of my flower beds. The dashes of color--purple money plant, the white bells of leucojum--poke out above the ground-hugging blue cloud. Naturally enough, our attention focuses on the taller red tulip or yellow daffodil or purple money plant. This is a gardener's definition of attention.

That blue haze at the base of the garden represents our peripheral awareness. While we focus on the beautiful, the different, the unique, we are also aware of bird song, cool breeze, and that blue haze of forget-me-nots.

Try this in your meditation. Spend one period of meditation simply noticing how the mind works. Hearing, seeing, feeling are all happening in the background, then the mind is drawn to something or other (probably a thought) and focuses on that.

Smile. You've just succeeded at noticing the difference between attention and awareness.

Still Eating Fiddleheads

We are still eating fiddleheads here at my house and garden. I don't believe i've ever harvested fiddleheads this late in the spring. I used to think that fiddlehead season was the first week of May, but in recent years, it has moved to the last week of April with May 1 being absolutely too late to pick them.

This past April was cold, so the spring gardens got a slow start. Then i was away for 5 days, and when i returned the fiddleheads had unfurled their fronds into their full fernness. The fiddlehead that we eat is the sprout of the ostrich ferns; most other fern fiddleheads are unsuitable for eating. The ostrich fiddleheads taste like a combination of asparagus and spinach.

But my sweetie found one fern patch in the partial shade. The other ferns there were up and about, but the fiddleheads were just poking up. One or the other of us goes to that wild patch every day to harvest fiddleheads. This assures that we continue to find more young sprouts, even in mid-May.

Even when life offers us setbacks, our life energy keeps on going. There's no need to take the setbacks personally. Simply notice that things change and keep on changing. Even the fiddlehead ferns.

Woodland and Prairie

Last weekend i went to a wedding in northern Indiana, just at the western edge of the Eastern Woodlands. The habitat of hardwood forests originally stretched for a thousand miles from the Atlantic coast all the way to the present Indiana-Illinois border. As i drove toward the Illinois border, i could see where the woodlands (which are now mostly Hoosier cornfields) gave way to the prairie. The fields had fencerows filled with redbuds, and then suddenly, there were no trees growing in the fencerows. No more beautiful redbuds, which had nearly lined the interstate for an hour.

I was also seeing what couldn't be seen--the results of 100,000 years of glaciers advancing and receding. The land changed from ever so slightly rolling to absolutely flat--bulldozed by glaciers, but also by sedimentation from a proto-Lake Michigan, which expanded a hundred miles beyond its current shore. Flat, flat, flat.

The woodlands are rich in ephemeral wildflowers--spring beauties, phlox divercata, trillium. The prairie is a rich grassland, a savannah.

What i was seeing was the result of soil and rain--a little more here, a little less there.

What conditions are you creating for yourself? This moment conditions the next moment. When we bulldoze a situation with our opinions, it flattens other people's response to us. When we grow flowers of kindness and happiness, our future moments are more likely to be flavored with kindness.

You choose.

Earthworms Hiding

I planted onion seedlings yesterday. The earthworms i saw were small and sluggish, hiding from the newly hoed furrow. So i covered them and the onion seedlings up quickly.

Sometimes we want to go back into hiding, stay in bed, avoid our meditation practice while we hole up with our smart phone.

We know what's good for us.
You know what's good for you.

Lethargy and sleepiness are a hindrance--to your meditation and to your life.

Live according to your heart, according to your highest intention.  Wake up to this present moment.